Using Directives to Modify Web Page Compilation
You can modify web page
compilation by including directives. Directives
are keywords that are recognized and acted on by the ASP.NET page
compiler. They affect a page’s compilation, rather than its
presentation. Directives are delimited by the characters
<%@
and %>
and can appear
at any location in the source file (although Microsoft says that
“standard practice” is to place them at the top of the
file). For example, the following <%@
Page
%>
directive was shown
in Example 6-1, earlier in this chapter:
<%@ Page Language="vb" AutoEventWireup="false" CodeBehind="WebForm1.aspx.vb" Inherits="IdeExamples.WebForm1"%>
Directives are similar in form to HTML tags. There is the directive itself, followed by one or more attributes that specify various settings associated with the directive. A directive without attributes has no effect. Directives are different from HTML tags in that the delimiters are different and in that directives have no closing tags.
ASP.NET defines the following directives and associated attributes:
-
@
Assembly
Provides a way to reference assemblies defined elsewhere. This directive’s attributes are:
-
Name
Specifies the name of an assembly in the global assembly cache. For example:
<%@ Assembly Name="System.Windows.Forms" %>
-
SRC
Specifies the path of a Visual Basic .NET source file to be compiled and referenced. The path is relative to the web application’s virtual folder. For example:
<%@ Assembly SRC="SomeClass.vb" ...
-
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